Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
couldna larn ’er to be tidy. ’Er sims reg’lar unkid, ’er do (Wor.); (3) uncanny, horrid; (4) lonely, depressed; (5) cross, sulky; (6) stormy; (7) of the weather: close, sultry. Some of the terms for describing persons of sullen, ill-tempered, or peevish dispositions are worth quoting: e.g. cappernishious, crumpsy, frabby, glumpy—If he’s glumpy, let him glump—muggaty, perjinkety, snippety. To address a cantankerous person engaged in a quarrelsome discussion as ‘You nasty brabagious creature’ must give the speaker a pleasant sense of having said the right thing at the right moment.
An ugsome Sair
Other very expressive adjectives are: dowly (Sc. Nhb. Dur. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan. Lin.), lonely, melancholy; of places: retired, lonesome, e.g. A desput dowly, deeathly spot t’won [live] in, an old word found in Middle English, cp. ‘He fell to þe ground All dowly, for dole, in a dede swone,’ Destruction of Troy, c. 1400; gaumless (Yks. Nhb. Wm. Lan.), stupid, senseless, vacant, ignorant, without judgment, e.g. Well, if I ever did see annyb’dy so gaumless! Seems as if yo’d noo notion o’ nowt, cp. O.N. gaumr, heed, attention; perky, sharp, saucy, impudent, e.g. Sabina’s Bill is perkier then ony uther lad as I iver clapt eyes on; I sent him wo’d he wasn’t to mislest that theäre maggit nest e’ my plantin’, an’ I gets wo’d back fra him as he’d consither it, bud if I’d send him sixpence he was sewer he wodn’t; skiddley (Som.), small, diminutive, used generally with little, to intensify or to add contempt, e.g. Her ax me nif I’d like vor to take ort; an’ I zaid, thanky mum, s’I; an’ then if her didn bring me out a little skiddley bit o’ bird’n cheese, ’bout ’nough to put in a rabin’s eye; ugsome (Sc. n.Cy.), frightful, horrible, a derivative of O.N. ugga, to fear, e.g. a ghastly wound is: an ugsome sair, and a savage bull may be said to have ‘leuk’t at us varry ugsomely’; wairsh (Sc. Irel. n.Cy. Midl. Dev.), tasteless, insipid, cp. ‘A kiss and a drink of water is but a wersh disjune,’ Ramsay, Proverbs, 1737, and ‘werysshe as meate that is nat well tastye, mal savouré’, Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, 1530; wambly (Sc. Lan. Wil. Dev. Cor.), insecure, unsteady.
T’onest Triuth
Some forceful adjectives have resulted from the simple addition of an ordinary suffix to an ordinary standard English word, e.g. dateless (Wm. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. Lin.), stupified, foolish, disordered in mind, having the faculties failing through age, insensible, as from a blow, literally, without a date, unconscious of time; deedy (Sc. Yks. Midl. Hmp. Sus. Wil. Dor.), full of activity, industrious, painstaking, earnest, e.g. a deedy body, a practical person, an industrious worker. It was once a literary word, cp. ‘In a messenger sent is required … that he be speedy, that he be heedy, and, as we say, that he be deedy,’ Adams, Lycanthropy, 1615; eyeable (Chs. n.Midl. Midl. Cor.), pleasing to the eye, sightly, as the man who was selling ready-made clothes in the market said of his stock-in-trade: There’s a many things that’s eyeable, but isn’t tryable, or buyable, but theäse things is eyeable, an’ tryable, an’ buyable an’ all; hurryful (Shr.), quick, hasty, hurried, e.g. It inna the ’urriful sort o’ folk as bringen the most to pass, for they runnen about athout thar yed ŏŏth ’em; easyful (w.Yks. Shr.), knowful (Yks.), yonderly (Lakel. Wm. Yks. Lan. Chs.), are good, homely substitutes for indolent, well-informed, absent-minded, literary adjectives, which by comparison with the dialect ones sound prosaic and harsh. Indeed, yonderly in particular, when applied to persons, is an untranslatable epithet, and yet one which exactly describes certain types of mind. It can also convey a sense of the pathetic, e.g.
Then Nan lewkt at ma wi a lewk
Soa yonderly an’ sad.
Natterin’ Nan.
Yonderish (Yks. Lan.), on the other hand, is not a friendly and gentle term, it can be even abusive, when used in speaking to persons who think themselves superior to other people, e.g. Theaw needsno’ be so yonderish, theaw’rt nowt ’at’s owt [thou art nothing that is anything]. Very expressive too are some of the participial adjectives, such as: gaustering (Chs. War. Yks. Lan. Lei. Lin.), blustering, bumptious, e.g. Sike a braungin’, gausterin’ taistrill [such a swaggering, bumptious, good-for-nothing rascal]; snazzling (Yks. of the wind or weather), cold, biting, bleak; to lead a threppoing, pungowing life (Chs.) means the sort of life where it is hard to make both ends meet, when one is puzzled how to get on, a hand to mouth sort of existence; all cottered into snocksnarls signifies in an entangled heap; a oondermoinded nassty trick is a nicely explicit phrase; so is the sentence: I was so cumpuffled I didn’t know what I was about; throssan-, or thrussen-up (Lakel. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan.)—literally, thrust-up—means conceited, forward. A Yorkshire woman, when on a visit to her son in the South, was asked by a lady in rather a patronizing manner, what she thought of South-country ladies. She replied: Wah, to tel ye t’onist triuth, the’r nowt bud stuk-up thrussen-up things wi’ nowt mich abaht ’em, the’r all ahtside.
Natterin’ Nan
It is not easy to make a typical selection of what may be called expressive words, partly because the choice is so very wide, and partly because one is apt to exaggerate the merits of words which appeal to one personally, and so one is not an impartial judge. There are certain quaint dialect words which bring back to one’s mind the days of one’s childhood, the old family nurse, or the gardener who reigned supreme in the garden of long ago, and so for old sake’s sake these words express more than meets the ear of a stranger. Here, however, is a sample of verbs of various kinds: brevit (gen. use in Midl. counties), to search, ransack, &c., as in the following account of a visit to the dentist: Soo the doctor, a lukes at my tooth a bit, an’ begins a-brevetin’ abaout among his bench o’ tules, an’ a says, tell ye what Joo, a says, yo’ mut grin an’ aboide this turn. Soo ah says, ah cain’t grin if ye doon’t lave me noo tooshes, ah says. Soo a says, Ah, but yo’ can Joo, a says, yo’ can grin o’ the wrong soide; cabobble (e.An. Cor.), to mystify, puzzle, confuse, e.g. You wholly cabobble me; chunner (Sc. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. War. Shr.), to grumble, mutter, murmur. A clergyman, asking an infirm old woman how she was, received as an answer: I goes on chunner, chunner, chunner. Whereupon he proceeded to give her a homily showing how wrong it was to be discontented, when he was stopped by the old woman: Bless you, Parson, it’s not me that chunners, it’s my innards! Fratch (n.counties), to quarrel, dispute, as for example, when a loud noise of wrangling voices is heard, some one may suggest that it is two women fratching, or forty men fighting; glox (Hmp. Wil.), of liquids: to roll about, make a gurgling sound when shaken inside a vessel; goggaz (Chs.), to stare, e.g. What a’t tha goggazin’ at naï? Tha’s noo moor manners abaït thee till if tha’d bin born in a wood; guggle (various dialects), to gurgle, make a bubbling sound, which looks at first sight like a made-up word, but which was known to Cotgrave, and to Dr. Johnson, who has: ‘To Guggle. v.n. [gorgoliare, Italian] To sound as water running with intermissions out of a narrow mouthed vessel’; gnatter, natter (Sc. and n.counties), to grumble, complain, fret, e.g. Natterin’ Nan, which is the title of the most famous of Ben Preston’s dialect poems:
Bud t’wahst o’ fouts [faults] at I’ve seen yet,
I’ woman or i’ man,
Is t’weary, naagin’, nengin’ turn
At plaaged puir natterin’ Nan.
A local Dick
Cp. E. Fris. gnattern, murren, verdriesslich sein; knacker (Glo.), of the teeth: to chatter. A local preacher—such as is termed in Yorkshire ‘a local Dick’—was once preaching a sermon on the Last Day, in which he foretold the end of the sinners present in chapel: Every limb of your bodies will shake like the leaves of an aspen tree, and your teeth will knacker in your heads like frost-bitten mariners. Maffle, moffle (Chs. Nhp.), to spend recklessly, squander, waste in trifles. In the accounts of a certain parish, where all the money could not be accounted for, appeared this item: ‘To moffled away £40.’ Maunder (gen. dial.), to talk idly and incoherently, to mumble; mopple (Yks.), to confuse, puzzle. At a cottage prayer-meeting a Minister was, as it is called, ‘engaged’ in prayer, when he became